The Oak Island Pirates: A Study in Fakelore

Bob Mackreth
August 1, 2018

Aaargh, me hearties, listen well: there once were pirates in these waters!

Spend enough time in the Apostle Islands and sooner or later you'll hear the story. Back in the days of the fur trade, you'll be told, a band of pirates lurked among the islands, preying upon hapless voyageurs, then scuttling back to an Oak Island cave to divide up their loot. Tour boat captains and kayak guides love to tell it, magazine travelogues trot it out with delight. As Park Historian at Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, I got used to the question, "Weren't there pirates out there for a while?"

The answer is "No." The pirate story is absolute nonsense, without a shred of evidence behind it, but the tale just won't seem to die. Where on earth did this myth come from, and how did it spread? Evidence points at two parties who share blame: a nineteenth-century huckster who concocted the story, and an amateur chronicler who pulled it out of history's junkheap many years later and gave it new life.

The earliest mention that I've ever found of the Oak Island pirates comes in an article published in the Bayfield County Press in 1886, titled "The Isles of Lake Superior: Descriptive, Historical and Legendary." Written by a Madeline Island hotel owner and resort promoter named George F. Thomas, the lengthy article presents a mixture of fact and fantasy about the islands' history. When he comes to the origin of the archipelago's name, Thomas introduces the pirates as if sharing a secret known to few others:

"Perhaps mystery is a virtue on the matter of the names. However, this story must be divulged. The 'Apostle Islands' was applied to this group because about the year 1805 a band of pirates, known as 'The Twelve Apostles,' there being twelve in number besides the captain, had their rendezvous in a cave on what is now known as Oak Island… A party of French capitalists was on their way to the newly discovered copper mines of the North Shore, when they were attacked by the pirate band; but, contrary to their previous good fortune, the outlaws were all captured."

It's a simple matter to poke holes in this story. To begin, the chronology is off: the name "Apostle Islands" was around at least sixty years before the supposed time of Thomas's pirates, appearing on maps as early as 1744. French attempts at mining copper go back even further, but came to an end in the 1730s. Then there's the matter of that cave: the Oak Island shoreline has been well-charted since Thomas's time, and there's no cave to be found. Finally, there just wasn't much loot of the sort to attract pirates. The fur trade was largely a barter economy, and voyageurs weren't given to carrying precious metals or cash.

But just for a moment, let's set these facts aside and give Thomas some leeway. Does he at least offer a source to back up his claim? In fact, he does:

"My informant, a descendant of French Canadians, said that when he was a boy he remembered reading an account of an adventure with the outlaws."

In other words, "I heard the story from a guy who said he read about it somewhere."

That's not exactly convincing. Is there any other evidence out there to back up Thomas's tale? Does the pirate story show up anywhere else in the records?

That's another great big "No." Over many years combing through the region's historical records, I have not found so much as a hint about pirates in anything written before George Thomas published his article. None of the other regional histories written in the nineteenth century breathe a word about pirates, nor is there reference to pirates in any accounts from the explorers, travelers, and missionaries who wrote of the islands in earlier days. The final nail in the myth's coffin is the absence of any mention of problems with pirates in the records of the fur traders themselves, the supposed victims of their terror. Substantial documentation has survived from the French, English, and American enterprises who controlled the fur trade in turn, and none of them complain about pirates.

Could it really be possible that all of these observers managed to miss such an intriguing tale in their own back yard? That the local fur trade officials didn't think pirate attacks worth reporting to their superiors?

Or is it more likely that an ambitious hotel owner was making things up?

Thomas repeated his tale several more times, and it grew with each telling. More than a decade later, he took a stab at the publishing business, producing several issues of a magazine he titled Picturesque Wisconsin. The third issue, dated June 1899, contains a greatly-expanded account of the pirate story, once again ascribed to a French-Canadian friend, who purportedly read it in a book at the Montreal public library years before. Thomas still does not name the friend, who must have had a phenomenal memory, considering the wealth of detail recounted, but at least this time he gives the mysterious book a name: The Twelve Apostles.

The pirate legend largely faded away after Thomas passed from the scene. A 1916 geography textbook repeated Thomas's easily-disproven claim that the archipelago was named after the pirate band, and the story turned up in a promotional flyer for a 1920s-era tour boat, but after that, the story seems all but forgotten until the late 1950s, when a local newspaper columnist brought the buccaneers roaring back to life.

Those of us who care about the history of the Chequamegon region owe a great debt to Eleanor Knight, whose weekly articles in the Bayfield County Press did much to preserve the area's historical heritage. However, on February 27, 1958, she messed up badly. Under the eye-catching headline, "BAND OF PIRATES ONCE OPERATED ON OAK ISLAND," Knight reports her rediscovery of Thomas's 1899 article, leading off with a sentence that conveyed no sense of doubt: "A band of pirates lived on Oak Island during the eighteenth century."

The account she passes along moves the buccaneer era back to a period "between 1775 and 1800" - a time, incidentally, when the local fur trade was in doldrums, and potential victims would have been in short supply. This version adds many dramatic details to Thomas's 1886 account. There's mass murder, kidnapping, a climactic battle, and even a love story. The encounter with the "French capitalists" unfolds differently this time: rather than ending with the pirates all captured, we're now told that they killed nearly all of the Frenchmen. The only man spared was the mining engineer, "whom they held prisoner, hoping to use his knowledge in their future operations."

The pirates remodeled their victims' boat into a "warship," but then things went sour. After anchoring their new man o'war in a cove off the mainland, they carelessly let down their guard. A voyageur hired to search for the missing Frenchmen happened upon them at just this moment, and hurried to La Pointe with the news. Local citizens quickly assembled a flotilla of small boats carrying "complete armament," surprised the pirates, and captured them all without casualty.

That's quite a dramatic episode, and one has to wonder why not a single area chronicler ever mentioned it until George Thomas came along.

The story is still far from over, though, and there's a major surprise yet to come.

"After a short delay at La Pointe the pirates were taken to Montreal for trial and all were executed except the chief. The engineer, who went to Montreal with the captured pirates, discovered the pirate chief was his own brother, and through various strange circumstances was able to save the chief from execution."

That shocking twist was still not enough for Thomas. Every good tale of adventure needs an element of romance, so he introduced an Indian maiden for the mining engineer to marry. Daughter of a "great medicine man," her Ojibwe name meant "Light of Day," but the young woman's white friends called her Madeline.

What a coincidence! There was another local Indian maiden around the same time who became the wife of a white man who ended up calling her Madeline. Her name was Equaysayway, and she married the La Pointe trader Michel Cadotte in 1793, eventually becoming the island's namesake. The big difference is that unlike the young woman in the pirate story, there are plenty of records confirming this Madeline's existence.

Knight hints toward the end of her article that the surprise reunion and the love story seemed unlikely, but astoundingly she was ready to take George Thomas's word for the rest of it. As supporting evidence she added that she once found an old book in the Ashland library "with pictures showing various points on Oak Island described as the pirates' look-out."

That's right, another "old book" with no author, no name, and no date. A book that, if it existed, was almost certainly published after George Thomas started spreading around a story that everyone before him had somehow missed. A shifting and self-contradictory story, filled with improbable claims, that does not meet any reasonable standard of credibility. A story that Eleanor Knight should have checked out a lot more thoroughly before publishing under her name.

I think we're done here. This myth is busted.